By PATRICIA GUTHRIE; Patricia Guthrie, a reporter for The Albuquerque Tribune, shared the 1988 George Polk Award in local reporting for a series of articles on Indian alcoholism.

Published: July 30, 1989

In 1971, Michael Dorris, 26 years old and unmarried, was living in an isolated Indian community in Alaska, doing fieldwork for his doctorate in anthropology. Realizing that ''in a world of 'we,' I was an 'I' '' he decided that he wanted to be a father. Lacking a partner, Mr. Dorris decided to try to adopt a child alone. Part American Indian himself, he asked for an Indian child, and his application was forwarded to a national adoption service. A few months later, as he was settling into a new teaching job in New Hampshire, a social worker called to tell him that a 3-year-old boy from a Sioux reservation in South Dakota was up for adoption.

Mr. Dorris was warned that the boy had been born almost seven weeks premature; his mother was a heavy drinker who neglected him; he ''had not been toilet-trained or taught to speak more than a few words. He was diagnosed as mentally retarded.'' In the perfect abstraction of longing to be a parent, Mr. Dorris believed in the ''positive impact of environment.'' He assured himself: ''With me he'll catch up.''

At their first meeting in the social worker's office the boy Mr. Dorris calls Adam looked up from his toy truck and said ''Hi, Daddy.'' It was the beginning of a bittersweet relationship that has gone on for 18 years, lovingly and painfully described in ''The Broken Cord,'' the story of a child afflicted by fetal alcohol syndrome and of Mr. Dorris's personal investigation of the condition that has blighted his son's life.

Despite the attention of the best teachers, countless examinations by medical doctors and psychologists and the constant, doting care of his father and family, Adam Dorris never shook his bad start. He struggled through the Cornish, N. H., public elementary school; at graduation in 1983, ''he could not add, subtract, count money, or consistently identify the town, state, country or planet.'' He went on to high school in Claremont, a half-hour bus ride away. He was sent each day, but could not reliably get on the right bus going in the right direction to get home. He was transferred to a vocational education program at a school farther away. At the age of 20, he still could not count money or tell time. His I. Q. remained a steady 65.

In 1982, after Mr. Dorris had adopted a second son and a daughter and was on his way to having three more children with his wife, the writer Louise Erdrich, he learned at last what was really wrong with Adam. As head of Native American studies at Dartmouth College, Mr. Dorris was visiting a treatment center for chemically dependent teen-agers on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Sioux reservation when he saw three ''uncannily familiar'' boys who not only behaved like Adam but looked like him. He reached for a wallet photo of Adam to show the program director, who ''nodded, and handed it back. 'FAS too' '' he replied. It was the first time Mr. Dorris had heard the initials that stand for fetal alcohol syndrome.

''He's adopted,'' Mr. Dorris replied, ''And, yes, his mother did drink.'' Alcohol, Mr. Dorris soon learned, had damaged Adam's brain while he was still in the womb. And the damage could not be undone.

In the next few years Mr. Dorris learned a lot about fetal alcohol syndrome, a condition that was being identified and explored by the international medical community in the 1970's, just when Adam's medical and learning disabilities were baffling his father.

Medical news doesn't always travel fast. While Adam was struggling to comprehend the simplest of tasks in elementary school, some doctors were still prescribing an occasional glass of wine to pregnant women for relaxation. But by 1981, the Food and Drug Administration was warning health professionals that pregnant women should drink no alcohol at all, that even small, casual doses had been linked to increased risk of low birth weight and spontaneous abortion.

The definition of fetal alcohol syndrome, Mr. Dorris writes, embraces individuals who share several recognizable characteristics: ''(1) significant growth retardation both before and after birth; (2) measurable mental deficit; (3) altered facial characteristics; (4) other physical abnormalities; and (5) documentation of maternal alcoholism.'' By 1988 the ''mental deficit'' category had been refined to include ''attention deficits,'' or the inability to concentrate on a single task; memory problems; hyperactivity; low I.Q.; and an inability, apparently connected to a defective grasp of cause-and-effect relations, to handle money, regardless of ''sex, age, educational level or background.''

For three years after he learned the name of Adam's condition, Mr. Dorris traveled the country, collecting the bleak stories of Indians dying from whatever alcohol product they could find; death by hair spray, death by antifreeze (the fate of Adam's natural mother). He also heard of the grim beginnings; babies born reeking of cheap wine, babies born with delirium tremens.